WITH less than a year remaining for the current administration, the Take Up Space Movement (TUSM) has called for immediate government intervention in the country’s education system.
The coalition of youth and student organizations recently joined demonstrations during President Duterte’s final State of the Nation Address on July 26. It claimed that the education system was already experiencing a crisis long before the Chief Executive acknowledged the issue.
According to Jake Muñoz, convener of TUSM, education in the country has been neither free, accessible, nor quality for years, as shown in the alarming number of dropouts, school closures, and education-related deaths in the past years.
“Education is a right. But for the past year, it has felt more like a burden,” Muñoz stated. “Duterte will leave behind an education system that is prohibitively expensive, inaccessible to the masses and thus, a privilege for the wealthy.”
TUSM is pushing for what it termed as “#5Calls” through consultations held with youth groups, teachers, and parents from all over the country. It petitioned the prioritization of the education sector for vaccination to cause a swift return to safe face-to-face classes.
“This must be accompanied by systematic mass testing and contact tracing, as well as retrofitting [of] schools and surrounding environments to ensure their safety against [the pandemic],” Muñoz noted.
The coalition demanded greater economic support for students, teachers, and parents through subsidies for gadgets and Internet access, as well as the reduction and refund of tuition fees.
“No one should be made to pay for something they are being forced to do,” the convener pointed out.
The group also called for the recognition of Internet access as a human right, and for the government to come up with a plan for the eventual “de-oligarchization” of the nation’s telecommunications and electricity industries.
Member organizations of TUSM include, among others, the Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan, PLM BUKLURAN Student Alliance, and Katipunan Student Movement-Kasama-BULSU.